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Nigeria's presidential election, threatened with an opposition boycott, will take place as planned on Saturday, an official with the electoral commission said Thursday.
Nigeria's presidential election, threatened with an opposition boycott, will take place as planned on Saturday, an official with the electoral commission said Thursday.
"The election is holding; no doubt about it," electoral commission spokesman Segun Adeogun told AFP.
The Nigerian government has already given assurances that the election will take place on the scheduled date, despite the boycott threat.
Eighteen opposition parties earlier this week called for the disbanding of the election commission and demanded that Saturday's presidential ballot be postponed until "transparency and fairness" could be ensured.
They also called for the annulment of last Saturday's regional polls, which international observers described as marred by fraud and violence that left at least 20 dead.
The United States on Wednesday appealed to the opposition parties not to carry out their boycott.
But the State Department also called on Nigeria's government to take "immediate and comprehensive" action to prevent electoral misconduct and irregularities ahead of Saturday's polls.
"We urge Nigeria's political parties to adhere to the constitutional process and to participate in these elections," State Department spokeswoman Julie Reside said.
"Evidence of wrongdoing should be brought to the attention of authorities and all parties should cooperate in the peaceful resolution of disputes through appropriate legal means," she said.
Nigeria currently supplies around one fifth of US oil imports.
The wrangling over when and how the elections will be held comes amid religious strife in northern Nigeria's main city Kano where troops on Wednesday killed 25 presumed Islamic militants.
The military offensive followed an attack on a police station by the militants that left 13 dead.
By the end of Wednesday the authorities were saying that they had flushed the militants, whom residents described as numbering some 400 and being heavily armed, out of the part of town they had taken over.
Kano was calm but tense Thursday with the militants' former stronghold cordonned off by countless military checkpoints and deserted expect for soldiers.
An AFP reporter saw the bodies of two armed robbers who had run through one of the checkpoints by mistake and been gunned down. He said the bodies of the Islamic militants shot had been removed from the scene.
Authorities in the north of the country fear the militants who were routed might regroup and stage other attacks elsewhere in the region.
The governor of Kano State, Ibrahim Shekarau, said in a radio broadcast that security agencies throughout the north of the country were on alert for such attacks.